Lu Xun, Peking Opera and Modernism: China as a Literary Model in

Lu Xun, Peking Opera and Modernism:
China as a Literary Model in Anna Seghers’s
«Zwei Briefe über China»*
MIN ZHOU
R OGER W ILLIAMS U NIVERSITY
Denn wir schreiben ja nicht, um zu beschreiben, sondern um beschreibend zu verändern. (Seghers, «Kleiner Bericht» 8)
Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem «Anderem» ist nämlich […] auch eine Auseinandersetzung mit dem eigenen Selbst. So [… kann] jede Einbeziehung, Entlehnung
und Verherrlichung des Fremden indirekt als Ausdruck des Bewußtseins eigener
Beschränktheit und Ergängungsbedürftigkeit aufgefaßt werden. (Bauer 176)
Throughout her life, Anna Seghers took a keen interest in China. Several fictions of hers take place in China.1 Despite her «abiding reticence about personal matters» (Kane 8), Seghers recollected her encounter with China during her childhood and youth in a couple of essays («Verwirklichung» and
«Erinnerungen»). A picture of her and a Chinese author, Hu Lan Qi, from
the 1920s as well as pictures of her taken during a visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1951 were also widely publicized. Unlike her contemporary Bertolt Brecht, however, the discourse on Seghers’s relationship
with China has been ignored until now or, at best, mentioned only in passing. This essay calls attention to Seghers’s letters about China, «Zwei Briefe
über China.» Reading the two letters against the biographical and historical
background that are important to their composition and to our understanding of them, this essay will investigate Seghers’s appropriation of the stylized
qualities of Chinese art forms to promote a modernist aesthetic despite the
domination of socialist realism theory in the cultural policy of the German
Democratic Republic (GDR). The focus will be on the cultural-political
dimensions of the «Zwei Briefe über China» as the letters appeared within
East German contexts. Methodologically, then, this essay aims to bring Seghers’s effort to bridge aesthetics and politics to the foreground. It also strives
to challenge the monotonous image of socialist realistic literature and calls
for a new approach to East German literature in general and Seghers’s works
from the postwar period in particular. This new approach would do away
with the stereotypical positive or pejorative moral judgment of the author,
focus instead on her literary work, and evaluate it from the perspective of
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historical circumstances as well as newly acquired information about her
life.
To start, I propose to look back at the reception of China in Europe and
Seghers’s rather unusual encounters with and her view on China against this
background.
Noch bevor man in Europa genau wußte, wo China geographisch zu lokalisieren
war, beschrieb man schon, wie es dort zuging: Ganz anders; alles schien geradezu
auf den Kopf gestellt.
Nicht den wahrheitsgetreuen Berichten des Marco Polo (1298), sondern den
daraus zusammenphantasierten Abenteuer des Ritters Mandeville (1366) wurde
Glauben geschenkt. Wer «China» beschrieb, wollte seinen Lesern vor allem ein
Bild von etwas anderem vor Augen führen, wollte etwas schildern, das abschrecken
oder vorbildlich sein sollte und so weit entfernt war, daß man es mangels exakterer
Zeugnisse einfach glauben mußte – oder wollte. China war literarische Metapher
für den Kontrast zum Abendland.
Written in 1985, this passage by Thomas Lange reads like a German version
of Edward Said’s argument about Orientalism, namely, that it was European
«desires, repressions, investments, and projection» that invented the Orient
(Said 8). The passage further testifies to Said’s view on German Orientalism,
that is, lacking «a protracted, sustained national interest in the Orient […],
the German Orient was almost exclusively a scholarly, or at least a classical,
Orient: it was made the subject of lyrics, fantasies, and even novels, but it was
never actual» (19).
Said’s theoretical framework shows its shortcomings when applied to particular cultural instances such as Seghers’s visit to and writing about the PRC.
In 1951, Seghers traveled to the PRC with an official GDR delegation to attend the celebration of the second anniversary of the founding of the new
Chinese state. Within about four weeks, Seghers toured the cities of Beijing,
Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing and Tianjin as well as rural areas to witness the
Chinese people’s new life. In addition to the Forbidden City, the Great Wall,
museums and theaters, she also visited universities and factories, attended
state banquets and mass rallies and met with farmers, workers, soldiers, writers, artists and her friends from the past.
The essayistic work «Zwei Briefe über China» results from Seghers’s only
visit to the PRC and reports on a real China rather than a fantasized one. In the
first letter, entitled «Erster Brief (Über Literatur-Fragen),» Seghers examines
modern Chinese literature and its representative Lu Xun and points to the
importance of creating a new written language and new forms of expression
to respond to changed lives and social structures. The second letter, «Zweiter
Brief (Über Theater-Fragen),» on the other hand, investigates Peking Opera
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157
and uses its symbolic and abstract features to support Seghers’s argument that
modern art is not formalistic but is an effective way to represent social reality.
Not only is Seghers’s account of Chinese literature and theater quite accurate,
but more importantly, the letters reveal Seghers’s belief that the East is the
West’s equal and can genuinely influence the West. In an interview in 1976,
Seghers once again expressed her rejection of classical antiquity as a source of
universal norms:
Die ostasiatische Kunst hat schon früh starken Eindruck auf mich gemacht. Während meiner Arbeit am Ostasiatischen Institut kam ich in einen Kreis junger Leute,
mit denen ich mich eng befreundete. In einem Punkt waren wir alle derselben Auffassung: Wir waren nämlich gegen die Theorie, daß die Kunst überall ihren Ursprung in der antiken Kunst hätte.
Ein junger Wissenschaftler [versuchte …] nachzuweisen, daß die ostasiatische
Kunst sich unabhängig hearusgebildet hat. Meiner Freundschaft mit diesem Kreis
verdanke ich, daß ich noch heute viel und gern über verschiedene Kunstepochen
lese und die Kunst besonders liebe, die man fälschlich primitiv nennt. (Roscher and
Abusch 54–55)
Seghers’s love for so-called primitive art resolutely opposed the Orientalist
«idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the nonEuropean peoples and cultures» (Said 7). Her rejection of this dominant racist
European view is not surprising considering her Jewish background. Born
Netty Reiling in Mainz, Germany, in 1900 of Jewish descent, she adopted
the pseudonym «Seghers» from a seventeenth-century Dutch painter whose
work she came across while writing her dissertation on Jews and Jewry in the
work of Rembrandt. As a Jew and Communist – she entered the Communist
party in 1928, the same year she made her literary debut – Seghers fled Nazi
Germany and lived in exile in France and Mexico from 1933 to 1947. Her
mother, however, died in a concentration camp in Poland during World War
II. Having experienced the destruction of European Jewry, Seghers defied inherently racist theories and practices such as Orientalism. This essay will also
show that in the postwar period in which the interview above was conducted,
the East also had an ideological dimension defined by the Cold War confrontation that moved the East-West division westwards to the Elbe River and
turned Seghers and the GDR into part of the Eastern territory.
Seghers’s emphasis in the interview on art from «East Asia» (ostasiatisch)
rather than Said’s focus on the Near East, on the other hand, resulted from
her lifelong interest in China. In its colonizing aspirations at the turn of the
twentieth century, Germany portrayed China as a «gelbe Gefahr» to justify its
ruling of the Chinese seaport Qingdao (Denkler 381). Paradoxically, German
occupation of Qingdao led to increased encounters between people of the two
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nations and to the emergence of a new image of China in Germany (Romero, 1900–1947 131). Individuals such as Richard Wilhelm, a missionary who
took great pride in not having baptized a single Chinese in his entire twentyyear stay in China, promoted the great cultural and spiritual insights of China
through their writings and translations.2 Striving to reveal «the soul of China»
(die Seele Chinas) to their German readers, these books presented a more positive picture of China, different from that at the turn of the twentieth century.
Seghers’s fascination with China began in her childhood when she read
Chinese fairy tales and poems and saw Chinese paintings and calligraphy
(«Verwirklichung» 6). Inspired by this ancient civilization, Seghers went on
to study art history and sinology at Heidelberg University. Between the two
Chinese cultural traditions of Confucianism and Taoism, Seghers was drawn
to Taoism and its embrace of romance, spontaneity and naturalness. One of
Seghers’s favorite Chinese books was Liaozhai Zhiyi (Strange Tales from a
Chinese Studio) («Erinnerungen» 388). Written in the seventeenth century,
the book borrows from oral folk tradition and features a series of captivating,
highly colorful stories. The boundary between reality and the odd or fantastic
is successfully blurred in these supernatural tales.3 Seghers’s love for demons,
spirits and fantastic things, her fascination with folklore, the occult and the
metaphysical, anticipates her modernist approach in literary creation and her
vindication of modernism, as discussed below.
In addition to the image of an ancient and spiritual China delivered by
books, Seghers also made efforts to «encounter a real China.»4 Although
«[i]n unserem Institut war nie die Rede von dem zeitgenössischen China»
(387), Seghers collected news about contemporary China from newspapers
and was attracted to such revolutionary movements as the Chinese people’s
fight against the intervention of foreign powers in the aftermath of World War
I and Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People. It was also during this time
that Seghers came into contact with political refugees from China who helped
open her «eyes for many political scenes and for class struggle» (388). She
became friends with them, found inspiration from stories they told her, and
published works that take place in China or are related to China. Half a century later, she remembered her courageous Chinese friends with great respect:
Bald kamen wir in Deutschland selbst mit jungen chinesischen Menschen zusammen. […]
[…] Sie waren dem Tod entronnen und lebten eine Zeitlang in unserer Mitte, um
ruhig zu studieren.[…]
Unsere Freunde fuhren als Lehrer zurück in die roten Provinzen im Süden. Es
war eine gefährliche, vielleicht oft tödliche Heimkehr. Sie traten sie aber so kühn
und hoffnungsvoll an, als sei ihre Reise leicht und froh. («Verwirklichung» 7–8)
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Even during her exile, Seghers followed with interest Chinese political developments and commented on them.5 At a time when Germany was becoming
increasingly Fascist, the Chinese people’s desire and fight for freedom and
independence appealed to Seghers and gave her hope for an alternative future
for Germany. Several years later, Seghers once again found affinities between
East Germany and China. With the composition of her two letters about Chinese literature and theater, she hoped to overcome the impasse of modernism
in an East German cultural landscape that was dominated by socialist realism.
Here it may be instructive to review in synoptic form Seghers’s view on the
relationship between modernism and realism and the historical background
of the postwar period. These bear fundamental pertinence to the composition
of the two letters about China.
As «one of the greatest modernists of her time» (Fehervary 1), Seghers took
part in modernism from the outset of her literary career.6 Despite the skepticism and criticism of her political companions,7 Seghers continued to assimilate influences from expressionism, documentary literature, montage techniques and interior monologue (Hilzinger 45). At the same time, she sought
opportunities to expound her understanding of realism to her colleagues.
In 1932, Seghers published the essay «Kleiner Bericht aus meiner Werkstatt.» Written in the form of a dialogue, the essay discusses how to portray
effectively Chinese textile workers’ celebration of May 1 in Shanghai.8 Contrary to the belief of some leftist artists and theoreticians that realism ought
to reflect life in its totality, Seghers expresses her modernist approach, one
that «beschreibt richtig ein Stück Wirklichkeit, der schnell ihre wichtigsten
Elemente erfaßt, den Extrakt dieser Wirklichkeit» («Kleiner Bericht» 14). In
other words, realist literature is to focus on the essence of reality rather than
giving a photorealistic impression.
The nature of realism was also a main agenda in her correspondences with
Georg Lukács in 1938. Seghers questions Lukács’s acceptance of the view that
realism is a mirror of the world. She counters him with the argument that
splinters of a mirror can also reflect a fragment of the world. The very precondition and premise for any artistic creation, she points out, is not mirroring or
observing the world, but actively participating in it. The classical heritage, on
the other hand, cannot give a writer the immediacy of basic experience.
Differences in social realities thus necessarily lead to different forms of presentation. What Lukács «see[s] as experiment in form» and what may look
like «wild breaks in style, experiments, peculiar mixed forms» is, according to
Seghers, «a forceful attempt at a new content.» The attempt is unavoidable as
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it responds to the writer’s immediate experience. To illustrate her idea, Seghers
contrasts the world of Goethe with those of Heinrich von Kleist and Georg
Büchner. She interprets the latter’s formal experiments as a necessary step for
the authors to portray the reality of transitional times and to express their
shock and turbulent experience. Seghers confides to the Marxist theoretician
the concern that his definition of realism might block the artistic innovations
of socialist writers. Instead of placing realism in opposition to modernism,
Seghers calls for a broader, more inclusive realism that nurtures new, creative
and experimental methods to represent difficult times (Lukács 167–97).
If Seghers recorded in the letters to Lukács her view on modernism and
realism, a topic of debate among left intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s, then
her two letters about China were an immediate response to the Cold War and
its impact on the cultural policy in East Germany. Shortly after Seghers’s return to Germany from exile in April 1947, the Cold War started. To compete
with the West, the Soviet Union tightened its ideological control and sovietized the Eastern part of Germany, including its cultural life. The concept of
socialist realism was introduced and a distinction between socialist realism
and decadence was made in March 1948 (Hartmann 170). By and large consistent with Lukács’s realism theory, socialist realism was an officially sanctioned theory and method of artistic creation in the Soviet Union beginning
in 1934. It required artists to portray main characters in a positive and heroic
light and to educate the readers in the goals and meaning of Communism.
To satisfy the pedagogical requirement, socialist realism aimed to popularize
what had been an elitist artistic tradition. Works were expected to continue
the classical realist tradition. Modern forms and modernist experiments, on
the other hand, were rejected on the basis that they were too elitist to be comprehensible to the masses.
German writers and artists were called upon to write in the socialist realist style, or they were condemned as formalists. From 1948 through the
middle of the 1950s, the focus of East German cultural-political debates was
the campaign against formalism, a collective term that included expressionism, surrealism, abstract art and everything else that was somehow related
to these concepts. The witch hunting devastated East German cultural life.
One of Seghers’s letters to Wladimir Steshenski from April 13, 1953, gives us
a glimpse of the disappointment, frustration and fear that the anti-formalism
campaign brought upon East German intellectuals:
Sie warten, daß ich Ihnen von hier erzähle. Wie ich Ihnen schon schrieb, wurde ein
solcher Brief durch die Ereignisse abgebrochen, die uns alle betroffen haben. Wie
ich ankam, fand ich mehrere Leute unruhig, durch viele Fragen bedrückt.
[…]
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Um ein Beispiel zu nehmen für die unruhigen Geister. Das ist der Bildhauer
S[eiz], der mit uns in China war, der ist ganz unglücklich, weil seine Chinazeichnungen bis jetzt nicht veröffentlicht wurden. Und andere, ihm wichtige Entwürfe
nicht angenommen. […] Ich nenne ihn nur als ein Beispiel für die Künstler, denen
jetzt manches hier schwerfällt, so daß man nicht weiß, wie es weitergeht. Zum Beispiel Strempel ist nicht mehr. Ich weiß nicht, ob Sie sich noch an seine Malerei im
Bahnhof Friedrichstr. erinnern, die man abgekratzt hat. […]
[…] Es ist schwierig hier, in dieser Zeit des verschärftesten Kampfes, Menschen
zu finden, die richtig zu diskutieren mit den Künstlern verstehen. Und auch ein
negatives Urteil oder auch ein teilweise negatives in eine solche Form bringen, daß
der Betreffende Kraft und Ideen zur Arbeit bekommt und nicht in seinen Fehlern
fixiert wird. Oder gar abhaut. («Steshenski» 193)
Important here are both what and how Seghers writes in the letter, in particular what words she chose to describe the events that were taking place in the
GDR at the beginning of the 1950s. Anti-formalism campaigns are referred
to as «Ereignisse» and «unruhige Geister.» The word «abkratzen» recounts
how, due to formalistic manifestation, Horst Strempel’s mural was removed
after a display of only 28 months at the railway station Friedrichstraße. The
artist, on the other hand, was in too much despair to see any future for his art
and himself in East Germany. He turned his back on the GDR at the beginning of 1953, a sensation at the time that Seghers only touches on with the
sentence «Strempel ist nicht mehr.»
It is also worth noticing that, unlike Seghers’s correspondence with Lukács
in the 1930s, this letter does not refute the cultural policy despite its «unsettling» (unruhig) and «gloomy» (Leute [wurden] bedrückt) impact; on the
contrary, she admits that artists have made mistakes. What she hopes for is a
better way of transmitting criticism. She wishes to find cultural officials who
are capable of wrapping «ein negatives Urteil oder auch ein teilweise negatives» into an appropriate form that will help artists correct their mistakes
rather than «locking them in their mistakes» or simply «pissing them off.»
Furthermore, while Seghers writes about the suffering of concerned artists,
she does not mention anything about the damage the policy has done to contemporary art and literature, a topic she reflected on nearly two decades later
in an interview in 1976:
[Ich war], als ich aus der Emigration zurückkehrte, zuerst erstaunt über Vorstellungen, die es manchmal über die Wirkung von Kunst gab. Viele Arbeiten, die mir
schlecht und wirkungslos vorkamen, lobte man oft, andere, die ich für gut und
wirksam hielt, wurden verdammt. Unrichtig kamen mir Ansichten vor, wenn sie
der Entfaltung einer starken, vielseitigen Kunst entgegenwirkten. (Roscher and
Abusch 55)
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The rather weak critiques in her letter to Steshenski are surely Seghers’s compromises. At the same time, they are also part of a strategy informed by an
extremely complicated time and can be understand only in the context of the
«Zeit des verschärftesten Kampfes» (Seghers, «Steshenski» 193).
After the founding of both German states in 1949, the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 intensified the Cold War in Europe. In 1952, the year of the
publication of the two letters about China, the US testing of the first hydrogen bomb engendered fear in Seghers and many other Germans of a third
world war (Romero, 1947–1983 137). In the Cold War between the East and
the West, Seghers chose to side with the former, represented by the Soviet
Union. The Soviet state had triumphed over the Hitler regime and embodied
a social system that Seghers believed to be the only guarantee that Nazism
would not happen again. Despite her disagreement with the Soviet line of socialist realism, she could not challenge the concept publicly as the Cold War
made everything political, and any criticism could be abused on the other side
of the Iron Curtain.
In addition, although Seghers was internationally renowned on account of
her novel The Seventh Cross, she was still a new arrival in Germany. In the
power constellation of the GDR, which favored exiles from the Soviet Union,
Seghers was under pressure to prove herself as both gifted and trustworthy.
Finally, with her children studying in France and as a member of the GDR’s
Weltfriedenrat, Seghers needed international travel privilege granted from the
Communist party, making her particularly vulnerable (Romero, 1900–1947
99).
Despite all these circumstances, Seghers, who at the time was elected president of the East German Writers’ Union (Deutscher Schriftstellerverband),
cherished postwar East German art and literature dearly as a means to educate the reader and to construct a new, democratic and progressive Germany.
In an effort to reconcile East German artists and their cultural officials, Seghers intervened in her own way by writing to Steshenski. As the head of the
Auslandskommission of the Soviet Authors’ Union, Steshenski’s review of
East German literary and cultural works played a critical role in the reception of these works in the GDR. Seghers must have hoped that her connection to this powerful Soviet friend could win his support for Hanns Eisler,
whose Fausus libretto was criticized in 1953 as an offense against German
classical culture as she told Steshenski later in the letter.9 To show her backing
for Seitz, another frustrated artist mentioned in her letter to Steshenski, and
expedite the publishing of his China drawings, Seghers wrote a preface entitled «Verwirklichung» for his drawing collection Studienblätter aus China,
which finally appeared in 1953. The two letters about China are thus another
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attempt to bring her «negatives Urteil oder auch ein teilweise negatives in eine
solche Form» so that her critical voice could be heard, yet no unnecessary fuss
would be made of the criticism. To reach her goal, Seghers turned to travel
literature, a genre with critical potential, and set her eyes on China, a country
that she had always loved and her most recent visit to which gave her inspiration to deal with the rather sensitive topic.
Unlike Seghers’s other essayistic works about China10 that appeared in newspapers immediately after her visit to China and struck an anti-American tone
(Romero, 1947–1983 115), «Zwei Briefe aus China» appeared in August 1952,
nearly one year after the visit to China. They were published in Aufbau, a
journal of «Deutscher Kulturbund» and a forum for East German intellectuals in the postwar period. The epistolary style chosen by Seghers allows her
to integrate her critiques into seemingly spontaneous impressions and comments. It creates an intimate relationship between the writer and her reader
despite or because of the serious topic of the letters. The occasional form distinguished by «publikumsbezogene Subjektivität» (Frederisken 111) is itself
a challenge to the objectivity required of socialist realism. Addressing her
readers as «mein lieber Freund,» Seghers brings them to China right away:
Der Büffel in China, versteh’, das ist der Wasserbüffel der Bauern, ein gewaltiges,
aber sanftes Tier. Wir kennen ihn aus Geschichten und Bildern. Ich war froh, als ich
zum erstenmal einen von nah sah. Er lag vor dem Dorf, als sei er gestern aus Urzeiten hierher gekommen, und gleichzeitig so vertrauenerweckend in seiner kraftvollen Gelassenheit, als hätte sich die jahrtausendelange Zähmung von einem Tag auf
den anderen vollzogen. Ein Kind stapfte um ihn herum, er sah es ruhig an. («Zwei
Briefe» 8)
This short passage reads like a Chinese ink and wash painting, portraying a
child sporting with a water buffalo. It catches the idyll of country life in China, gives off the aroma of the earth and brims with peace, leisure and fun. The
vividness reveals Seghers’s superb skill as a writer and her insight into Chinese
cultural tradition.
Seghers’s purpose with this one and only poetic paragraph is primarily to
introduce to her reader the Chinese writer Lu Xun (1881–1936).11 Devoting his works to the ordinary person’s struggle and suffering, Seghers tells
the reader, Lu Xun compared himself to a water buffalo. «Die freudig und
freiwillig aufgenommene Bürde,» she adds, «die einer so wenig spürt wie der
Büffel das Gewicht eines Kindes, das ist das Volk selbst» (8).
Seghers explains to her reader that Lu Xun, as one of the outstanding authors in modern Chinese literature, along with other progressive intellectuals
abolished classical Chinese and used the vernacular language as a medium for
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written communication. To make literature more accessible to ordinary Chinese, Lu Xun also created a new form of expression, a short political satire,
that responds to the calling of his time, namely, to attack feudalist and imperialist enemies.
The rest of the first letter does not seem to have a «red thread» running
through it. Seghers reports on China’s campaign to eliminate illiteracy. She
comments on the immense responsibility Chinese artists currently face because millions of people have now acquired the ability to read literature. She
refers to Mao Tse Tung’s «Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature»
and discusses questions he raised in the talks. She mentions her conversation
with Chinese colleagues about formalism and cites their views on a particular
kind of formalism that has been ignored in the GDR.
The looseness of these ideas echoes the epistolary style. It also reveals Seghers’s struggle to take issue with controversial topics while keeping her critical voice from being too strident. It takes a mindful reader to connect the
various thoughts with one another and to understand Seghers’s contention
and her argument. Socialist realism’s goal of popularizing art and literature
brings with it, as Seghers sees it, a serious challenge. She formulates this challenge through a question raised by Mao’s talks, namely, what is the connection between spreading the level and raising it? («Was ist der Zusammenhang
zwischen Verbreiterung des Niveaus und seiner Erhöhung?») In other words,
how does one make art and literature accessible to the masses while at the
same time raising its level and preventing work of poor quality from being
produced? In Seghers’s estimation, there is no either-or answer to the question because content and form of the aesthetic work are closely related. The
appropriate content is primary, yet without a form that is on a par with the
content, no substantial artistic work can be created or widely distributed.
In writing about raising the artistic standard, Seghers rectifies a misconception that experimental literature (or «churlish» literature, as it is called in China) is of poor quality. On the contrary, she thinks highly of this raw literature
because it comes directly from life and is fresh and full of potential. Seghers
contrasts raw literature with classical literature, considering the former to be
sources (Quellen) and the latter only currents (Strömungen). She urges artists
to learn from raw literature and to view the classical heritage critically.
If raw literature is not formalistic, then what is formalism? Seghers cites
one of her Chinese colleagues and names a particular formalism that has been
ignored in the GDR:
Auch dann kann ‹Formalismus› entstehen, wenn jemand das Technische seines Berufes gelernt, dabei aber nicht im gleichen Maß an Lebenserfahrung gewonnen hat.
Das Leben ändert sich beständig. Der Schriftsteller drückt mit den inzwischen ge-
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165
lernten Mitteln immer weiter dasselbe aus. Aber dasselbe ist nicht mehr dasselbe.
Denn das Leben hat sich geändert. Er gebraucht zwar die richtigen Begriffe. Doch
er versteht die neue Anwendung nicht mehr auf die Wirklichkeit, die sich geändert
hat. Das Leben, das er darstellen soll, ist von ihm selbst nicht mehr durchgelebt. (12)
The passage very much reminds the reader of Seghers’s correspondence
with Lukács. There she ingeniously compares with the «sorcerer’s apprentice» those artists who manage to disenchant the world as they believe in the
magical power of a certain literary method and vainly attempt to portray a
world they themselves have not experienced. Here, Seghers tells her reader
that to portray the immediate experience of a changed world and to give the
portrayal fullness and originality, the artist would have to follow what Lu
Xun did, namely, to create something new in technical aspects such as expressions (Ausdrücke) or concepts (Begriffe). If, on the contrary, the artist sticks
to methods learned from classical literature of the past, the work produced
would be nothing but barren, lifeless and disenchanted.
How does one come to the right method then? Seghers ends her letter with
advice. It is first and foremost through «Lebenserfahrungen,» that is, engagement in life and participation in people’s struggles (Kämpfen). Next is through
«richtiges Denken,» which she defines as correctly analyzing life experience,
choosing the most important topic and answering questions contained in the
topic. As for professional-technical knowledge (Kenntnisse), Marxist teachings and cultural heritage, Seghers lists them with her advice about the right
method, but does not give any further explanation.
Thus, Seghers reverses the definition of formalism. Instead of charging
formal experiments with formalism, Seghers thinks of shaping a new and
changed world experience with the old literary forms as formalism. She criticizes artists who write according to a literary method rather than according
to their life experience, which ultimately determines the content and form of
any artistic work. While the first letter is a discussion on the theoretical level, in the second letter Seghers exemplifies through Peking Opera how form
originates from people’s life and is therefore part of realism.
The appreciation of Peking Opera is often associated with Bertolt Brecht,
who used his understanding of Peking Opera as a foundation for his theory of
the alienation-effect. While Brecht found inspiration from his «misinterpretation» of Chinese acting (Tian 200), Seghers gave an accurate account of the
core of Peking Opera and found in it a solution to the problems at home.
A performance art that developed over the span of more than a century, Peking Opera features a unique degree of abstraction and imagination, or lack of
realism. Peking Opera, for instance, does not have a naturalistic stage setting;
rather, the stage illusion is created by the actor’s performance, in particular,
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his hand gestures or stage steps. In addition, the colors and patterns of the
facial make-up are of such importance in Peking Opera that as soon as actors
wearing particular colors and patterns appear on stage, they are recognized
immediately by the audience without any self-introduction. All these conventions were «developed by Chinese actors from generation to generation
from their observation and experience in real life and [were] then condensed
and sublimated into an art of expression in which content and form cannot be
separated from each other» (Tian 208). Seghers keenly captured the quintessence of Peking Opera and accentuated it in the second letter to corroborate
her argument about formal questions.
Seghers opens the second letter with an account of her experience of watching Peking Opera. She was fascinated by the forms, colors, music and voices
and could not see enough of the actors’ movements that ran through the body
to the fingertip. When she looked at the faces of the Chinese audience around
her, however, she felt ashamed because, unlike her, the Chinese were deeply
moved.
The difference between her reaction to Peking Opera and that of the Chinese audience, Seghers tells her reader, is caused not solely by the language
barrier. What she did not understand were the meanings of actors’ masks,
their hand gestures, stage steps, as well as the fact that the gestures and steps
substitute for complicated stage scenery. Moreover, the tales and fables performed on the stage are based on folklore and legends that are tied to the Chinese people’s lives from the past. The stories are told by fairy tale narrators
and performed by jugglers from street to street. Chinese audiences grew up
listening to the tales and watching their performance which, in turn, have become part of their lives and culture.
Is this something formalistic? Seghers asks and quotes the response of Chinese writers and dramaturges:
«Sie fragen, ob nicht manches in unserer Oper abstrakt oder rein symbolisch ist?
Ihre Anschauung ist nicht richtig. Nie kann man nur als symbolisch ansehen, was
Ihnen vielleicht so erschienen ist. Vielmehr sind unsere Theaterstücke Kristallisierungen der alten Weisheit des Volkes.
Der kleine Stock in der Hand des Reiters bedeutet für alle: Pferd. Ist das nicht
viel mehr als ein wirkliches Pferd? Der Schauspieler, der den Reiter spielt, hat alle
Zufälligkeiten des Reiters, alle denkbaren Bewegungen in seinem Rhythmus komprimiert. Oder der Stadtwall. Ganz ohne Bühnenaufmachung wissen alle, wer jetzt
hier ankommt, der mußte reisen.
Unsere Darsteller haben das Leben gründlich studiert. Generationen von Schauspielern haben das Leben gründlich studiert, um es vereinheitlicht und vereinfacht
darzustellen. Daraus entsprang unsere artistische Form» (Quotation marks are
Seghers’s).
Lu Xun, Peking Opera and Modernism
167
[…] Von Ihrem Standpunkt aus dürfen Sie nicht versuchen, unser Theater zu erfassen. Es hat bei uns seine einzigartige Form. Sie beruht auf den Erfahrungen, auf
den Träumen, auf dem Leben des Volks. (15)
In citing contemporary Chinese artists Seghers argues the point that it is a
serious misunderstanding to label Chinese performance as purely stylistic or
formalistic. The forms of seemingly abstract gestures and steps are neither
abstract nor formalistic as they come from life, and «everyday things are artistically selected, condensed, sublimated, typified, idealized, beautified, and
transformed into a work of art» (Tian 206). Rather than merely imitating life,
Peking Opera represents life in a more concise and effective way. The performance appears strange to Seghers because she does not share the Chinese
audience’s life experience and their cultural tradition. She is therefore not appropriately socialized to understand the performance.
The emphasis on the difference between Seghers (you) and the Chinese artists (we) illustrates the gap that existed between East German cultural officials
and artists and articulates Seghers’s criticism of the former. At the same time,
the dynamics between Seghers (you) and the Chinese artists (we) has also
changed the typical Orientalist’s relationship to the Orient. It is no longer
the superiority of «we/Europeans» over «them/the Orient»; instead, the European is eager to learn about and from the Orient and to resolve its «eccentricities.» She is engaged in a face-to-face dialogue with the Chinese and gives
them voice. The involved European also finds in Chinese art an equal counterpart to European art: she equates the stylized make-up in Peking Opera
with the masks in Greek tragedy; a tragic love story in a local Chinese opera
reminds her of Shakespeare’s «Romeo and Juliet»; she finds the storyline of
another Peking Opera omnipresent in antiquity as well as in modern dramas
such as Racine’s Andromache. Seghers’s explanation of these coincidences is
clear: different histories and life experiences have given different forms of representation to universal emotions: «Jedes Volk, auf Grund von jahrundertelangen Erlebnissen, nimmt eine künstlerische Form in sich auf, die es ohne
besondere Erklärung versteht» (16). With this, Seghers provides a living example of her premise that forms originate from lived realities and have nothing to do with formalism.
In public debates about the legacy of GDR literature and culture since 1989,
Seghers is one of the first East German authors whose life and work have been
bitterly discussed (Brandes 175–97). Although the opening of archives and
the release of her personal papers and documents have provided more insight
into Seghers’s personal life, little has changed with regard to the reception of
her works. Except for a few publications (Janzen and Horn) and within the
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Min Zhou
circle of the Anna-Seghers-Gesellschaft, scholarly attention is paid primarily
to Seghers’s literary work created in «the years 1933–40 when much of her
best work was written» (Wallace 1); her other works, especially those written
after her return from exile and in the GDR, are considered affirmative and uninteresting, a view that reflects a dichotomy «between Lukácsian realism and
Western modernism» that, long after the end of the Cold War, still prevails in
the study of GDR culture and literature (Hell 11).
Seghers’s two letters about China, however, raise important questions. What
is socialist realism? Do socialist realism and modernism really exclude one another? And how are we to evaluate East German works created under the spell
of socialist realism in general and Seghers’s works from the postwar period in
particular? As this reading of Seghers’s two letters shows, socialist realism or
realism in general was never a monolithic or unanimously accepted concept
among leftist intellectuals either before or after the founding of the GDR. Instead, artists like Seghers endeavored from the very outset to defy the narrowness of the concept and to modernize it. Due to the particular historical context
and their personal experience, it was difficult for these artists to rebel against or
dissent from the official cultural policy publicly. Rather than fixing on Seghers’s personal life and her public speeches and questioning her political integrity, therefore, it would be much more productive to focus on her works written
in the GDR and examine their complexities from a different perspective, one
that shifts away from ahistorical black-and-white moral judgment and investigates Seghers’s later works in their historical context with «newly acquired
hindsight» (Silberman 27). Instead of making the distinction between the «lie»
of fiction and the «truth» of nonfiction (diaries, letters, and so forth), literary
critics should not «treat one text as the implicit meaning of another, but rather
[…] read them all with and against each other in order to bring out their points
of tension, contradiction and similarities» (Moi 5). The intertextual network
of Seghers’s two letters about China indeed represents a broader, more inclusive and modernist concept of realism under the banner of socialist realism
in East German literature and a more complex picture of Seghers as a writer.
As far as the reception of Seghers’s two letters about China is concerned,
they did not seem to have had an immediate impact on either artists or officials in East Germany. As it often happened in the GDR, Seghers’s soft yet
critical voice was either drowned out by official exclamations or outweighed
by her silence in public life that disappointed others’ expectations of her to
speak out.12 Retrospectvely, this led many to question her integrity, especially
after Walter Janka published the book Schwierigkeiten mit der Wahrheit and
articulated his deep disappointment in Seghers’s refusal to defend him and to
intervene publicly in his trial (Brandes 175–97).
Lu Xun, Peking Opera and Modernism
169
This reading of the «Zwei Briefe über China» shows that because of her
background, her experience of World War II, and under the intense pressure
of the particular ideological and historical circumstances of the Cold War,
Seghers was very cautious. As president of the East German Writers’ Union,
it was important to her to have some impact on policy-making and to help
East German art and artists as much as she was able. Straightforward public
protests would have availed little, while literature might bring her criticism to
a targeted audience. Rather than opposing the regime, Seghers chose to reach
out to both intellectuals and officials and hoped to bridge the gap between
them. Romero nicely summarizes Seghers’s politics of criticism:
Seghers hatte jedoch eine bescheidene Meinung von ihren Einflußmöglichkeiten
oder tat zumindest so, um eventuell hinter der Szene operieren zu können. Auf
den Tisch hauen war nicht ihre Art: Sie wollte öffentlichen Widerspruch und jedes Aufsehen vermeiden, da sie «falsch ausgelegt» werden und damit der Sache des
Sozialismus im Kalten Krieg schaden konnten. Obendrein war sie viel zu nüchtern, vorsichtig und diszipliniert, um sich auf Kreuzzüge einzulassen: Wenn etwas
aussichtslos wurde, weil es auf den starren Willen der Parteiführung stieß, gab sie
auf, was aber nicht bedeutete, daß sie dann wie viele andere mit den Wölfen heulte. Sie schwieg und wartete. Sie wurde aber auch zur Meisterin der kleinen Geste,
mit der sie plötzlich in Ungnade Gefallenen ihre Sympathie und Solidarität zeigte.
(1947–1983 116–17)
What Seghers achieved, however, was more than sympathy and solidarity.
She preserved her public influence and was able to contribute to the balance
between politics and aesthetics and to endorse a new generation of artists in
their pursuit of «subjective authenticity,» a modernist concept that was coined
in the 1960s and is often associated with Christa Wolf.
«Was wäre das Jahrhundert ohne sie?» Wolf ended her introductory essay to Anna Seghers. Eine Biographie in Bildern with this question (9). To
understand the importance of Seghers’s impact on East German art and literature, we will take one last look at the artistic life of China. Around the
time of Seghers’s visit to China, Peking Opera, like many other Chinese arts,
was at the beginning of radical reforms that lasted for decades. Justified by
the enforcement of socialist realism, many traditional plays were eliminated,
revised or rewritten, while new plays were created to represent contemporary
life in China (Yang, «Reform» and «Bamboo Curtain»). Although traditional
features such as hand gestures and stage steps were partially retained in the
new plays, other imaginative and symbolic characteristics of the classical Peking Opera were replaced by realism: the color symbolism and patterns of facial masks were no longer observed, and modern make-up designs were used;
civilian costumes were substituted for elaborate traditional costumes; bare
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Min Zhou
stages were replaced by realistic settings complete with naturalistic sound and
lighting effects (Wilkinson 164–74).
Chinese artists and writers suffered from the great demand that the Communist party made on them and their art. Many of them were unable to produce anything, and they all lived in constant fear. At a forum in 1957, one
of the Chinese intellectuals dared to ask Mao Tse Tung, «What would have
happened to Lu Xun, had he been alive today?» Lu Xun’s timely death in
1936 before the Communist party gained power in the Sino-Japanese War
was believed to have contributed to the party’s celebration of him as the representative of modern Chinese literature. What, then, if he had lived to see
the Communist party’s practice of its cultural policy? Mao’s answer to the
question was straightforward: «Lu Xun? Either he would have been locked in
prison yet kept writing, or he would not have said a word.»13
Mao was not creative enough to envision another alternative, that is, Lu
Xun could have kept writing and voicing his criticism of the party in such
a strategic way as not to endanger himself while still helping his colleagues
and promoting a broader concept of socialist realism. If so, Chinese art and
literature would not have had to wait until the 1980s to see the late arrival of a
modernist movement.
Notes
*
1
2
3
4
5
Research for this article has been supported by Roger Williams University Foundation
to Promote Scholarship and Teaching. I would like to thank Eva Kaufmann, Humboldt
University, and Belinda Kong, Bowdoin College, for their encouragement and suggestions. I am grateful also to Weijia Li for information about Anna-Seghers-Archiv and
Theodore Fiedler for his sensitive comments and editorial help.
Seghers’s fictions that take place in China include the short stories «Der Führerschein,»
«Die Stoppuhr,» «Der Last-Berg,» «Marie geht in die Versammlung,» and «Die Kinder.»
Part of the short story «Der erste Schritt» and of the novels Die Gefährten and Die Toten
bleiben jung also takes place in China. For more information about Seghers’s works related to China, see Romero, 1900–1947 236–69 and documents in Anna-Seghers-Archiv
(ASA) at Literaturarchiv der Akademie der Künste, Sig. 834.
«Richard Wilhelm,» web, 5 May 2009, < http://www.schoolofwisdom.com/wilhelm.html>.
For more information about the book Liaozhai Zhiyi (Strange Tales from a Chinese
Studio), see web, 5 May 2009, <http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/LiaozhaiZhiyi>.
Seghers wrote, «Es war für uns schwer, mit der Wirklichkeit in Berührung zu kommen.
Es war schwer, aber nicht unmöglich» («Verwirklichung» 6). Unless indicated otherwise
all translations are my own.
In «Verwirklichung,» her introduction to Gustav Seitz’s Studienblätter aus China, Seghers wrote about Agnes Smedley, a young journalist who reported on the Chinese Civil
Lu Xun, Peking Opera and Modernism
6
7
8
9
10
11
171
War for the newspaper Die Frankfurter Zeitung in the 1930s. Romero mentions that
while exiled in Mexico, Seghers wrote her article «Chinas Schlachtgesang. Betrachtungen zum Buch von Agnes Smedley» and published it in two issues of Freies Deutschland
in 1943/44 (1900–1947 484).
Seghers’s first book, Aufstand der Fischer von St. Barbara (1928), won her the prestigious
Kleist-Preize in 1928 because it displayed «eine starke Begabung im Formalen.» In 1947,
a critic of The Seventh Cross called Seghers a «surrealistische Dictherin» because «[ihre]
irrationalen, überwirklichen Sprachbilder» «doch immer wieder in die Wirklichkeit einmünden,» to name two examples. For more details about Seghers and her modernist
writing, see Schrade, Hilzinger and Stephan.
By the time Seghers wrote «Zwei Briefe über China,» she had weathered many controversies. Her first book, Aufstand der Fischer von St. Barbara, was criticized among left
wing circles. Because of the book’s portrayal of too-primitive fishermen and their neurasthenic leader, it was excluded from «proletarisch-revolutionären Literatur.» A couple
of years later, with the publication of her second work, Auf dem Weg zur amerikanischen
Botschaft (1930), Seghers was again under attack for being too similar to formalists. She
was said to have placed «das Hauptgewicht auf ästhetische Probleme» and to be «zu
stark geprägt von dumpfen Erinnerungenen aus der (bürgerlichen) Vergangenheit.» The
book was considered a triumph of «[n]icht Realismus, sondern (gemäßigter) ‹Surrealismus›.» For more details, see Schrade 22–26.
As Romero reveals, the dialogue in «Kleiner Bericht aus meiner Werkstatt» is not a fiction but took place between Seghers and the Chinese author Hu Lan Qi. The report they
worked on appeared in the same year on the front page of the May issue of the leftist
journal Rote Fahne (1900–1947 245–46).
As head of the Auslandskommission of the Soviet Authors’ Union, Steshenski was
charged with updating Soviet authors on East German literature and culture. His review
of East German literary works played a critical role in the reception of these works in the
GDR. For more information about Steshenski’s role in East German culture, see Hartmann and Eggeling 316–22. With her letter to Steshenski, Seghers enclosed Hanns Eisler’s opera text «Dr. Faustus,» which was attacked in 1953 as an offense against German
classical culture. Seghers wrote in the letter to Steshenski, «Eisler ist zur Zeit in Wien.
Ich sah ihn kurz vorher gänzlich verstört und erzürnt. So daß ich daraufhin erst sein
Theaterstück las. Ich will aber hier jetzt keine Kritik des Stückes geben. Ich schicke es
lieber. (Das heißt, wenn Sie wollen, schreibe ich Ihnen meine Meinung)» («Steshenski»
193).
Publications about her visit to China include a lecture and a report. The lecture, «Vortrag
über chinesische Bauern vor Brandenburgischen Bauern» (1951), focuses on contemporary Chinese history, in particular the fight between the Communist party and its
enemy, the Nationalist Party. The report, «Im neuen China. Aus einem Reisebericht»
(1951), was given to the plenum of the German peace committee in Berlin. It speaks in
detail of the mobilization of ordinary Chinese people to join the Korean War, to battle
against imperialists and to defend their peace. Neither piece was ever reprinted.
The printing of the letters in the journal Aufbau incorporates the image of a stamp issued in China that features a portrait of Lu Hsün and his autobiographical poem, which
Seghers translates into German in the letter: «Er start zornig auf seine Feinde mit ihren
gehässigen Zeigefingern. Freiwillig nimmt er die Bürde auf sich, als diene er seinem Kind
als Büffel» («Zwei Briefe» 8). Seghers received the Lu Hsün stamps mailed to her by
Xiaoye Li, a writer from Tianjin, during her visit to China in 1951. She took detailed
172
12
13
Min Zhou
notes of her discussion with dramaturges in Shanghai about Chinese operas and incorporated these notes in her two letters about China. See more information about Seghers’s visit to China in 1951 at ASA, Sig. 624.
A typical example of Seghers’s silence was her behavior at the Kafka Conference in 1963
in Prague. As Mittenzwei reveals, Seghers attended the conference along with an East
German delegation and delegations of other Eastern European countries. Despite Kafka’s influence on her in her youth, Seghers was very cautious to attend only the first day
of the conference and did not say a word about Kafka, who was considered decadent in
the GDR (206–10). Romero explains this complicated situation: «Offensichtlich wollte
sie nicht in die Kontroversen gezogen werden, denn das hätte bedeutet, entweder gegen
die ohnehin isolierte Delegation ihres Landes […] oder aber gegen Kafka Position zu
beziehen. Beides wollte sie vermeiden. […] Seghers verweigerte sich der seit Kriegsende
die Gemüter erregenden Politisierung und Polarisierung um den Dichter, die auf der
Konferenz eine Art Höherpunkt erreichte» (1947–1983 226).
Zongying Huang, «Lu Xun Huo Zhe Hui Zen Yang? (What if Lu Xun lived today?).»
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